Advanced Stem Cell RX

IN THE NEWS

Did stem cells prolong Gordie Howe’s life?
USA TODAY
June 10, 2016

Gordie Howe, known as “Mr. Hockey,” was also becoming known as “Mr. Stem Cell.” Howe received stem cell treatments in December 2014 – treatments that his family credited with helping prolong his life after a debilitating stroke about two months earlier. Before the treatments, Howe could barely walk or talk and was on the verge of death, his family said. Within hours after the treatments, he regained speech, mobility and vigor.

Stanford University medical researchers led by the Chairman of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, who have been studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into the brains of stroke patients. On Thursday they said that they were “stunned” by the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function in some of the patients. While the research involved only 18 patients and was designed primarily to look at the safety of such a procedure and not its effectiveness, it is creating significant buzz in the neuroscience community. Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine believe the therapy could also work for other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

A body part that many would wish away — their love handles — can be turned it into life-saving transplant: Researchers reprogramed fat cells from a person’s waistline into pancreatic cells capable of producing the crucial hormone insulin. If further testing shows that the cells are safe to implant into a person’s body, and effectively produce insulin once they are there, they could one day be used to treat people with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes, experts say.

“Capitalizing on the design principles of synthetic biology, we have successfully constructed and validated a synthetic lineage-control network that replicates the differential expression dynamics of critical transcription factors and mimicks the native differentiation pathway to programme hIPSC-derived pancreatic progenitor cells into glucose-sensitive insulin-secreting beta-like cells that compare with human pancreatic islets at a high level.”

Stem cell therapy shows promise for people battling heart failure, a new study finds. The clinical trial found that end-stage heart failure patients treated with stem cells harvested from their own bone marrow had 37 percent fewer cardiac events than those who received a “dummy” placebo. “For the last 15 years, everyone has been talking about cell therapy and what it can do. These results suggest that it really works,” says study author and cardiac surgeon Dr. Amit Patel, director of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City